Economics is profoundly unromantic, so it’s usually the last thing on your mind when you are cautiously approaching that cute stranger dancing with their friends. That stranger who, according to your drunk and totally trustworthy estimation, has been giving you signs all night. That same stranger, who (at least for some) is the ultimate return on your investment, the justification for your decision to nobly sacrifice your liver, eardrums and brain cells in the pursuit of a good night out. But as with every worthwhile endeavour, the higher the potential reward, the higher the risk. Unless you are blessed with psychopathic indifference to humiliation, you secretly dread the possible scenario of rejection, which may be neither compassionate nor polite.

Actually, if you represent the 99 per cent who just hate the sinking feeling of being informed just how unworthy they are, economic theory might have something to offer you. If you are good at the game, you are most probably one of two things: extremely good-looking, or an unwitting practitioner of game theory.

In many dating situations, you essentially find yourself trapped in a classic example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Assuming you like each other and are in a mood for a hook-up, both you and the stranger would be better off “cooperating” (in game theory lingo) and hitting it off, but no one is willing to risk being humiliated. As you can never be sure that your advance will be accepted, and as the stranger can never be sure they will be accepted if they make the first step, it is very likely that both of you will stay back and keep sipping your drinks and chatting to your mates, maintaining the status quo but also sparing yourself the emotional pain.

Indeed, both of you staying silent seems to be a Nash Equilibrium, or a situation from which neither you nor the stranger can personally deviate without losing out. That is the reason why many singletons (and more than a few coupletons) in a club are looking to score, but only a small percentage of them actually do something about it. This is also why the typical club landscape includes table after table and group after group of people pretending to have the time of their lives, while secretly wishing a suitor would come talk to them.

This is where alcohol, as a proxy for bravery, changes the status quo. The Nash equilibrium here is crucially dependent on how much pleasure you will get from hooking up, as compared with how much pain you will feel if you get rejected. As humans tend to exhibit strong pain aversion, to remember bad experiences and forget good ones, and to be very sensitive to perceived loss of social status, a sober person is likely to be more afraid of humiliation than excited by the prospect of hooking up. Therefore, their payoff matrix, the fancy name for the box showing their relative preferences, looks something like this:                                                                                                 

		Cute Stranger
		Play	Stay back
You	Play	2 and 2	-5 for you and 0 for them
	Stay back	0 for you and -5 for them	0 and 0

 In fact, in this situation there are two Nash equilibria: Play/Play and Stay Back/Stay Back. However, staying back seems to be the “safer” equilibrium, as deviating from it will cause a greater change in the well-being of either you or the stranger (-5) than Play/Play will improve this well-being (+2).

However, when you drink or simply realize life is too short to fear humiliation, those numbers change:

		Cute Stranger
		Play	Stay back
You	Play	2 and 2	-1 for you and 0 for them
	Stay back	0 for you and -1 for them	0 and 0

Being rejected will now cost you only 1 point of happiness, as opposed to still gaining 2 points in the case of success. The “preferred” Nash equilibrium will thus be (Play;Play) – you both want to go for it. Therefore, drinking and bravery lead to more hook-ups. Which explains that magic touch alcohol gives, as well as the other elusive weapon of ‘players’, those experts in applied game theory: fearlessness.